Scars and Lifelines
by RavenWriter89
Summary: Charley learns about Peter's past, one scar at a time.


_Another Fright Night Kink Meme prompt. This time with Peter's scars, and Charley learning about his life one scar at a time._

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><p>He should have noticed them before, all those years ago when he first met him. It wasn't like he was hiding them. He was never shy about his body, practically flaunting it for the nervous seventeen year old. Of course, back then, Charley had been too concerned with his cover story, and the vampire, and getting help, and all that other shit that had been going on at that time to notice anything about the half-naked man other than that he was very deliberately drawing attention to his leather pants.<p>

But now, when he came home (such a strange concept, _home_, that he had with this equally strange lifestyle) to find the aforementioned leather pants draped over a chair in the front hall, he took very particular notice of it. Charley wandered through into the main room and saw a thankfully subdued Peter lounging in front of the fire. He was in that black robe that only gay bachelors and porn stars wore (and Charley suspected that Peter fell into both categories) and was staring morosely into the flames. No bottle was visible, but that didn't mean much. Charley dropped his book bag on the floor, as much to announce his presence as to unburden himself.

"How was school?" came the muttered question.

"You sound like my mom," Charley answered. "Every time she asks, it's like she's expecting me to recount sordid tales of frat parties and streaking."

"That's what uni's for," Peter said. "That's the stuff you remember. At least, that's the stuff I remember." He tore his gaze from the fire and stared at Charley. "I thought UNLV was respectable."

Charley snorted. "Nothing's respectable in Vegas. Least of all college students." He dropped down into the chair next to Peter and allowed the flames to hypnotize him. That's when he saw it. Peter had his legs stretched out in front of him, and the light reflected off a crosshatched scar running across his ankle. "What's that?" he asked, pointing.

Peter twisted to look at the injury in question. "Ah, that. One of my own sordid tales from uni." Peter leaned forward and winked. "I was nineteen, and it was the last week of school, and we wanted to celebrate. Some of us were leaving, travelling, moving on, and we wanted a last hurrah for our group of mates."

"And that?"

Peter grinned. "We jumped off a bridge. I landed on a shopping trolley we didn't see under the water. Eight stitches and all the pints I could want for a week. Brilliant."

"And now you have a permanent reminder of it."

"Exactly."

Charley shifted in his chair and felt something in his pocket. He pulled it out and saw that it was a Sharpie marker he stuck there earlier in the day. He fiddled with it for a bit before an idea hit him. He knelt before Peter and grabbed his left ankle. Pulling the cap off with his teeth, he wrote 'Being an idiot - Age 19' above the scar. He sat back in his chair to see Peter watching him with a mix of confusion and intrigued interest.

"There," Charley said. "Now you can remember why you got it."

Peter stared at the writing for a moment longer, then seemed to approve of it. "How is school, really?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

Peter shifted, and as he was rarely uncomfortable talking about anything (he'd almost watched him _have sex_, for god's sake), Charley was immediately suspicious. He always worried that Peter would try to be a father figure to him, and that is not how he wanted their friendship to work.

"Well, college is a time for figuring things out. You know, seeing who you are, where you fit, what's worth fighting for. And, I know that you're the last person I should be telling this to," Peter said, falling into a familiar drawl, "and I'm the last person who should be saying this, but be careful. Don't get mixed up in anything too crazy."

"Like mini-golf?" Charley asked, unclear where this parental concern was coming from.

Luckily, the joke had cracked the moment, for Peter sat back and laughed. "Learn from my mistakes, kid. I'm constantly reminded of them," he said as he pointed to the vandalized ankle. "Take this one." He fumbled with his robe front and Charley had a moment of panic before he saw that yes, Peter did have a modicum of modesty, and that the 'mistake' in question was on his stomach.

"Appendicitis," Peter said proudly. "Nearly died. I didn't tell anyone I was in pain because I thought they'd make fun of me. Took two days for it to burst. Doctors operated just in time. I was thirteen," he enunciated.

Charley realized, too late, that he had created a game. Peter was watching him again, daring him. He shook his head at himself as he leaned forward to write 'Stubbornness – Age 13' on the man's stomach. When Charley pulled back, Peter had produced a clove cigarette from somewhere (well, he was a magician) and was smugly smoking it. Only Peter would insist on smoking something illegal in the States while ranting about how terrible regular cigarettes were.

The look on Peter's face said that he thought he won that round. Charley wondered if he was right.

Peter was looking Charley up and down, somehow invading his space without moving or speaking. "I don't have any scars," Charley assured.

"Not even from...?"

"No," he said sharply. The less said about _that_, the better.

Peter took a long drag. "You're lucky."

His tone made Charley look at him. For the first time since Charley met him, he seemed _old_. Reclined in his too-big chair, calmly smoking, and eyes never leaving his face. Peter had seen terrible things, and it sometimes showed in his eyes. He tried to appear as shallow as possible, but Charley had seen through that, saw that there was something of the mentor and the hero and the comrade in him. Peter needed a counterpoint to bring those traits out, which was why he kept Charley around. Why Charley had to ask.

"Where?"

Peter rolled up his sleeve. There, in the crook of his elbow, was a tiny cross-shaped scar. It was raised and ragged, and Charley knew without asking that it had been caused by a long claw-like nail. "I was nine," Peter said. He was looking at it without any hint of emotion, as if it was an interesting mole instead of a reminder of a painful past. "He grabbed me and cut me, but he got distracted and I escaped." He took another long drag of his cigarette and nodded slightly towards the Sharpie still in Charley's hand, granting permission.

Charley hesitated. The last two had been jokes, poking fun at Peter's stupidity, but this... He finally wrote 'Victim – Age 9' above the tiny scar. The mood had shifted from daring and playful to something heavy and fragile. Charley returned to watching the flames while Peter was making the still lit cigarette disappear and reappear.

"Look, Peter, I think I should-" Charley started to say at the same time Peter said, "There are loads of others."

They both paused. Charley broke first. "Other what?"

Peter grinned. "Other scars. All with a story." Another puff of smoke. "You think you should what?"

'I think I should go,' was what Charley had been thinking, even though he didn't really believe it. "I think I should hear the rest of those stories," he said instead.

"Hah!" Peter laughed. "I knew there was some fun in you somewhere." He stubbed out the cigarette and jumped out of the chair. When he wandered over to the bar, he saw Charley's face and explained, "We're swapping stories. We need drinks. Isn't that want men usually do in these situations?" He brought over an assortment of bottles (including the dreaded Midori, Charley noticed) and arranged them on the table biggest to smallest before selecting two.

A glass was shoved into Charley's hand. "Basic whiskey and water. We'll start with that. Cheers!" Peter clinked his glass with Charley's and knocked back the mixture. Charley sipped his more slowly.

"You want to hear stories, then?" Peter challenged.

"Gimme your best shot," Charley said.

Peter immediately stood and turned his back to him. He lowered the robe off his shoulders and let it drape across the small of his back. Charley stared at the livid marks presented there.

"Research," Peter said flippantly. "New part of the show. I wanted to have something for the fetishists out there."

"And you hanging upside down wasn't doing it for them?" Charley said. Jesus, he knew Peter was dedicated but submitting to an actual whipping? It seemed too much, even for him. "These are new."

"A few months old, yeah."

Peter stood still while Charley examined the wounds more closely. They had healed long ago, but retained their redness. The lines criss-crossed Peter's back without pattern, and the inherent violence (consensual though it must have been) startled Charley. He reached out without thinking and ran his hand across the man's shoulders. He felt the muscle underneath tense and relax. "You shouldn't have done that," he said quietly.

"Yeah, well, learned my lesson on that one. It was not as enjoyable as they promised." When Charley didn't move (or remove his hand), Peter said, "Well, then?" in that irritated tone only he could pull off without also irritating anyone around him.

Charley sighed and started to write 'Research' in large black letters across Peter's back, then paused. "Age?" he asked.

"Er, 39?" Peter said.

"Should I put that in quotations, then?" he teased.

"Oi!"

"Fine, 39, whatever." Charley finished the label while muttering, "I bet you've seen 39 a few times."

"And each one gets better than the last," Peter added, shrugging the robe back on and turning. "Oh the things I could teach you."

"I thought that was the point of this," Charley said. "Teach me from your example about things _not _to do."

"But the other things are so much more fun," Peter said, and he said it half-joking and half-serious and Charley wasn't sure which half was winning tonight.

So Charley played innocent, because if there was something that Peter Vincent couldn't stand, it was someone more stubborn than him. "Oh?" he said, and for good measure batted his eyes a few times.

Peter lifted his glass to his lips and drank it slowly, watching Charley out of the corner of his eye, and damn if Charley didn't feel like Peter always saw right though him. He wondered what it was that Peter saw in him that day that made him walk blindly into a vampire's nest.

"If you want to hear all my tales, map out all my mistakes and misjudgements, draw out the truth like a poison, if you want all that just so you don't have to make any mistakes of your own," he downed the rest of the mix, "then this stops now."

The vehemence in his voice surprised Charley, but it wasn't unexpected. "No, it's like you said. This time of life, it's about learning about stuff. I just want my mistakes to be a little less permanent." He poked Peter in the abdomen as he said this, just above the appendix scar. It struck Charley as odd, not that he was poking a half-nude, not-really-39 year old man in his Vegas penthouse, but that it seemed so normal. He really did pick fucked-up relationships.

Peter didn't seem to notice. He had a wicked grin on his face and rattled the ice in his glass. "Ready to get down and dirty then?"

Charley rolled his eyes. "It can never be clean and decent with you, can it?"

"Whatever gave you that impression?" Peter asked. He took a single step towards Charley, and he knew, he _knew,_ what this was about. That didn't shock him; what shocked him was that it took this long for either of them to realize it. It had been bubbling away beneath the surface, and both of them had been waiting for a catalyst to set it off. If anyone ever asked, Charley would say that the biggest surprise was that _he_ started this, not Peter.

"You're a dirty old bastard," Charley said, just to test the boundaries.

"And you're a witless college student," Peter replied.

Charley grinned in return, and pointedly drained his glass.

It took most of the night, but Charley managed to catalogue every single one of Peter's scars. There were scars hidden by fresh injuries (back surgery due to a stage accident that was labelled 'Hubris – Age 32') and there were wounds that left no visible marks (wrist broken in schoolyard fight, labelled 'Pride – Age 14'), but Charley tracked them all down. Booze bottles were emptied and scattered, bickering occurred, lessons learned (one memorable scar was 'Obliviousness – Age 16' that was due to a nail; that also was when Charley learned that Peter had _very _ticklish feet), and eventually the Sharpie was tossed aside in favour of less permanent but no less marking methods of examination.

Daylight chose to intrude, much to annoyance of Charley. He rolled open one eye to be faced with 'Being a smartass – Age 20' (caused by a bar fight, Charley recalled) written neatly behind Peter's left ear. He would never say it to him, never admit it, but this one time Peter was right. The other things are much more fun.


End file.
